Find Files and Folders in Linux Command Line

If you are new to Linux so you might be wondering, How to Find Files and Folders in Linux Command Line. In this guide we will cover how to use find commands with examples. This will help you to find files and folders in Linux command line.

Using find command to search files and folders in Linux command line

find is a power Linux command which is used to search files and directories under Linux operating system. While searching your files in Linux using find command, you can specify criteria, like search into a specific directory, if path is not specified by default it will search in Present Working Directory. It supports also regex and other advanced options.

By Name

The most easiest way to find a file is to specify the exact name of required file.

 find /path/of/directory/where/to/find/file -name "fileName"

Let’s Take a Real Example:

Suppose you remember only the file name which is backup.sh, but forget the location of file. In this condition you will use find command and search required file in whole system by giving the location “/”, This forward slash mean root of Linux Files System.

Command

 find / -name "backup.sh"

Command Result

/backup.sh
/home/BroExperts/backup.sh

The result of above command is showing I have “backup.sh” file on more than one location, as command found this file on “/” (root) and other copy is in home directory of user “BroExperts” which is /home/BroExperts

Note:- This command dealing all the keywords as case sensitive, meaning a search for backup.sh is different than Backup.sh.

In case, you forget the name exactly if it was in capital words or not. Here is command to search files, but ignore the case of the filename.

Command

find / -iname "backup.sh"

Result

/home/BroExperts/backup.sh
/Backup.sh
/backup.sh

Now it found two files, the difference is only upper and lower character “B” in file name.

By Type

Common types are:

• d: directory
• f: regular file
• b: block device
• l: symbolic link

Searching Folder/Directory

Using “d” as argument in find command we can search folder in Linux command line. For instance to search directory called “etc”, you will use following command.

Command

find / -type d -iname “etc”

By Extension

For example you want to search all files with “.conf”. To accomplished this we need to use following find command.

Command

find /etc -type f -name “*.conf”

By User

Find all files belongs to a specific user. Let’s search all files owned by BroExperts user.

find / -user BroExperts

Find a file with its name; owned by BroExperts user

find / -user BroExperts -name "backup.sh"

Next: Search Text within Files in Linux

Hope this guide was easy to follow and helpful for you to understand how to find files and folders in Linux command line. If you have any question please leave comment